After sparking controversy earlier this year with its search engine indexing policy, the US National Association of Realtors (NAR) has clarified its stance, saying agents can allow search engines such as Google to index their listings.
The NAR postponed their vote on the issue back in May, leaving a policy in place that allowed member boards to force their agents to block search engines from indexing listings shared between agent websites via Internet Data Exchange (IDX) agreements.
As inman.com reports, the NAR’s annual meeting in San Diego saw members change the wording of the IDX Policy – Multiple Listings Policy Statement 7.58 to delete the following sentence:
“Participants must protect IDX information from misappropriation by employing reasonable efforts to monitor and prevent ‘scraping’ or other unauthorised accessing, reproduction or use of the MLS database.”
A new sentence was added to make the NAR’s IDX policy clear on search engine indexing:
“MLS participants may not use IDX-provided listings for any purpose other than display on their Web sites. This does not require participants to prevent indexing of IDX listings by recognized search engines.”
The NAR also made a few other changes to its IDX policy: sellers can now request that IDX websites disable features on their home listing such as third-party comments and automated evaluations.
MLS data in an IDX listing can be refreshed a maximum of every three days rather than every seven. Finally, IDX operators must provide users with information on how to inform them about errors in listings.
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